This is a piece of writing I began the other night, out of the blue. This realization hit me, and while this writing is in a pretty raw form, with little evidence or footnoting being given, I assure you that in time, this post will become a coherent, finished piece of writing.
Why on Mushrooms, do many of us feel lucid, intuitive and connected to the world around us in a way never before experienced? We all know the sensation?It is that feeling of being newly born into this world, every color, every sensation a conduit to touching this primal force that surrounds us, ideas and understanding pass through our heads unconsidered yet recognized and acknowledged. How is that we feel this incredible connectedness (or disconnectedness) with ourselves and our environment in those subliminal moments of shrooming? I believe it has much to do with how we access and utilize our language faculty and our inherent and socially constructed human logic mechanisms while shrooming.
Human beings experience the world through language. As our senses perceive, our mind begins to churn linguistic machinery to accompany the experience. Through this process, we are in a constant subjective dialogue with ourselves as we go about our daily lives. As individuals living in the year 2004 in complicated societies, we have a huge language base, accompanied by science and logic and reason. We have complex grammatical rules along with cultural norms, morals and laws. All of these serve to condition and mold our subjective dialogue so that our internal discussion will produce a socially acceptable presentation (this isn?t the purpose of the laws, regulations and morals but rather the implicit effect, but part of the reason for Anxiety, Depression and OCD) Yet, have you stopped to consider what human beings would be like without all of these cognitive-linguistic resources? We have a multitude of words to describe so many different aspect of our experience, yet these words only survive in the preservation of data. In fact, our entire society is as ephemeral as the memories that hold the collective meanings. If you were to eliminate all of the knowledge and memory of the world, all of the technology and all of the innovation, what you would see more than likely* is human beings acting and living as we did 15,000 years ago. Try to describe your trip to someone else ? it is very difficult. Attempt to impart on others the realization and understandings you reached, the feelings you had and the complete intuition you felt. It is very difficult to do, and even if a coherent and intelligible explanation is given, more than likely your friend will have great trouble comprehending what you are trying to explain. Often the logic of your realizations don?t work when explained to someone not under the mushroom ? even to yourself, these deep truths and understandings you reached while shrooming, may seem like a scattered puzzle. In your normal mind-state, you can?t fit the pieces back together to remember and conceptualize that realization. I believe this is the linguistic dispendium.
I would argue that the Mushroom is a vehicle to experiencing a limited but impact full super-lingual human condition that our long-distant cousins lived in (although without reflection) thousands of years ago. This realization is paramount to understanding ourselves, each other and the direction that humankind is moving.
Human beings are fundamentally cooperative. We cannot survive on our own. As specie we have always lived in groups. According to current science, prior to 9,000 BCE all of humanity was hunter-gatherer tribes, wandering the plains and jungles of the world in search of food. In these cooperative units, language developed as a necessary tool for socializing and directing. Beginning with grunts and eventually evolving into words, humans constructed meaning through language to facilitate productive interaction between individuals. The efficiency of the group is exponentially increased when the first piece of language is created between people. After that, each successive unit of language adds to the constructed template of meaning that under lays social interaction. In these early groups, the human individual parted ways with his formless internal dialogue that was devoid of words and began to separate and dissect the world into different linguistic meanings. Granted, this process occurred over thousands of years, but eventually, as language became more and more integrated into human societies, dialogue became more and more defined by abstract, socially constructed linguistic definitions, moving the individual further away from his own experience defined by himself, and towards a self defined by words. This process affected the human being on a practical and psychological level. Because human beings who could communicate efficiently were more likely to survive (hunting, gathering, working together) those humans whose neurological makeup allowed for easy language acquisition and use were more likely to survive. Compound this by thousands of years of struggle around the globe; you have a language-centered human population evolving. Thus neurologically, we changed, in ways that I don?t know yet, so that our language faculty developed and began to become prevalent. Around 9,000th B.C.E, hunting-gathering tribes began to domesticate plants and animals and remain sedentary and at this point, there was a huge explosion of lingual use, as society became more complex. With agricultural surplus, populations began to grow and as they did, stratification became an integral aspect of social living. Instead of a communal hunting-gathering society there were now specialist; professional warriors, professional agriculturists, administrators etc. As society became more complicated, more language was created and implemented through linguistic evolution. As this process took place, the individual?s internal dialogue was more and more shaped by normative definitions and socially constructed terms (words). Meanings were formed, and the individual was soon so caught up in a his matrix of words, that the very essence of living became entangled in abstract terms.
So what? How does this relate to doing Mushrooms?
I have found that while on mushrooms, there is some fundamental connection or disconnection with the self and its environment. For me, it has mostly been connection, feelings of unity and wholeness. Reflecting back on my experiences, I recall using very little language in my internal dialogue, to describe to myself what I was experiencing. This contrasts heavily with the normal state of social living, where if you make yourself conscious of it, you will realize that you are incessantly defining, observing and assigning meaning to different aspects of your environment using language. When on shrooms, for whatever reason, internal dialogue is replaced with silence, and out of that quiet of the talking mind comes the incredible intuition and sensation from all aspects of the experience. I have also had one bad trip, and in it, I went down the intellectual, linguistic logic road, where with my best friend, I proceeded to tear apart the fabric of reason and meaning, a most depressing experience with effects that were prevalent for weeks later. Why can the mind do such great and horrible things with the same substance? It is all how we approach the experience in terms of the language we choose to use, and the logic that accompanies these definitions?
Further, as human society aquires more and more levels of complication, we as individuals require more education to understand these human constructions that we give meaning and definition to. Through this process the we move further away from our natural state, and it becomes harder to access that subliminal mindscape that we can sometimes see under the influence of mushrooms...
Human logic is interesting, and important to the exploration of how the mind functions under mushrooms, and how we influence our tripping experience through our logical sensibilities. I would argue that human logic is a evolutionarily created, caused and implicitly verified phenomenon. As we evolved as human beings, we perceived patterns at varying levels of cognition. At some level, of which i can only postulate exists, logical-lingual conceptions were created. Such things as beginings having to have ends, ends having to have beginings, nothing, everything, finite, infinite. As we evolved with language, (however the process began before language was there to define it) we began to define aspects of our environment. Certain logical establishments existed in the human mind because they were continually verified through our experiences: all things we see begin do end, and all things that have and end we perceive as having a begining. This means they are not real. Think about this: every major religion, every philosophy must adress our rational, logical sensibilities...it must explain how things began, so that we feel comfortable in our rationalization process. It is not true that there has to be a begining or an end, or a begining for an end or reverse...it is just a bio=chemical-electrical constrict that is a fundamental aspect of our condition!
Think about when you are shrooming...think about the logic of begining and ends...it is so circular, and so defined by language and logic. Yet both of these things are mere constructs or aspects of our own existence, neuroligical conditions...
Tell me what you think?
Edited by ParabolaChair (04/28/04 04:28 AM)
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